“You think it was an accident? A stunt gone wrong?” Bess demanded, her voice rising with hysteria now. “After what happened to me, Harry? Someone is out to get us. Isn’t that obvious?”

Houdini nodded thoughtfully. “That certainly was no accident last night,” he said. “Bess and me, we’ve done that stunt every night for the past nine years and never had a problem with it. It’s as easy as pie.”

“So how did Bess get into the trunk, if the lock was jammed?” I asked.

Bess looked suddenly coy. “We can’t give our secrets away. Let’s just say it wasn’t through the lid.”

“And you couldn’t get out the same way?”

“Not without revealing to the whole world how it’s done. It’s our bread-and-butter piece, you know,” Bess said.

“So you’d rather die than reveal how it was done?” I looked at her incredulously.

“I thought Harry had the key in his jacket pocket.”

“I see.” I looked from one of them to the other and a suspicion went through my head. Could this also have been some kind of stunt—some way of heightening the drama? But then Bess’s passing out was absolutely genuine. I was close enough to see how horribly pale she was, and how she regained consciousness gasping for breath. And her subsequent hysteria was genuine too.

I eased forward on the chair. “So do you have any idea who might have done this? Has anybody threatened you at all?” Of course I was thinking of the overheard conversation in the theater and the neat young man with blond hair who had pushed past me in the dark hallway. I wondered if he was the same young man who had made what sounded like threats to Bess when he had shown up at their front door and Houdini wasn’t home. He’d be back, he had said.

I looked at Houdini, but I didn’t detect any reaction as I said the words. Of course I suppose illusionists must have to master their expressions, and if he was being threatened by gangs, he certainly wasn’t going to divulge this to a strange woman, or to his wife. So I switched to another tack. “Is there someone in your world you can think of who carries a grudge or is out to get illusionists?”

Harry laughed. “I can name a whole lot of guys who’d love to see the end of me. But none of them was in that theater last night.” He perched on the bed beside Bess and took her hand.

“Are you sure? What about the other illusionists on the bill?” I asked.